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Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Review of Homunculus by James P. Blaylock

The
best works of a sub-genre are most often those which come to light in
hindsight.Unaware they were/are part of
a groundswell, there is no overt implementation of particular tropes or themes
in order to be part of a specific literary or cultural movement.Steampunk stories, for example, while billowing
in popularity after 2009-2010, have not since seen as many truly unique works
as the decades prior.The best novels
and stories produced before it became a cultural phenomenon, James Blaylock’s Homunculus (1986) is one such novel, and
indeed one of the sub-genre’s charming, capering, and unwitting cornerstones.

A
strange dirigible circling the rainy gray skies of England, the inventor
Langdon St. Ives works oblivious on his space rocket at the outset of Homunculus.But a late night burglary attempt on a
perpetual motion device brings St. Ives closer to the gyres of the dirigible’s
haunting significance.Snagging him and
dragging him into the proverbial machine, however, is his possession of the
memoirs of Sebastien Owlesby and its account of a magical little man trapped in
a box.With the dirigible’s orbit
decaying toward London, it isn’t long before it’s up to St. Ives and his Royal
Society fellows to attempt to bring down a scheme that no one seem to have a
firm handle on, right down to the very men perpetuating the scheme.

Graveyard
robberies, carp livers, animate skeletons, street corner religions, malevolent
indutrialists, train chases, vivisection, mysterious blue-enamel boxes, and a
series of misfortunate incidents propel Homunculus
precariously from one scene to another.Starting slow, the novel builds to a cartwheeling conclusion.Yes, there is a dirigible, the setting is
Victorian England, and technology exists that doesn’t in reality, but the
steampunk of Homunculus remains
background to “larger” bumblings.Whipping around the room like a loosed balloon, the story flits from
person to place, and takes its time building coherence.But once it’s got the reader’s brain moving
in rhythm, the story picks up steam (har!) to an uproarious ending.Robbing, scheming, chasing, preaching,
escaping, and otherwise being caught in a scenario nobody has control of, its
picaresque story done well.

But
it’s the characters which lie at the novel’s heart.Blaylock’s later stories do a better job of
defining personalities, but what’s in Homunculus
remains a delight; they bounce on and off one another trying to effect ideas,
steal them, or stop them—like a clown demolition derby.From Langdon St. Ives and his nemesis Ignacio
Narbondo to the myriad of eccentric characters who fill the gap between, the
story is a full on caper. Rendered in Blaylock’s unaffected, direct prose, it
would even have to be deadpan caper...

In
the end, Homunculus is Dr. Jekyl
& Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and anything by P.G. Wodehouse rolled into one—wearing a
propeller beanie.Not as refined as
later Blaylock works, there are moments the quantity of description threatens
to take over a scene.But what takes
time to come together, resolves itself in a satisfying clatter that gives the title
its meaning.We call it steampunk today,
but at the time the book was published it was just damn original fiction.(And I can’t help but think Ted Chiang read Homunculus before writing “Seventy-two Letters.”)

1 comment:

You have picked a family favourite here. Certainly Homunculus and the Anubis Gate by Blaylock's friend Tim Powers really began steampunk for my wife and I and led to a collection of everything these two men wrote. I also loved Blaylock's Burroughs inspired The Digging Leviathan, which turned Homunculus into a generational saga. Just the thing you need with a nemesis like Ignacio Narbondo.